


All Your Better Angels (are on other peoples' shoulders)

by trace_of_scarlet



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: M/M, Post The Reichenbach Fall, Pre-Slash, Reichenbach Angst, Reichenbach Feels, slashy if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-03
Updated: 2013-04-03
Packaged: 2017-12-07 09:35:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/747000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trace_of_scarlet/pseuds/trace_of_scarlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock post-Reichenbach: there's more to death than falling.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Your Better Angels (are on other peoples' shoulders)

Thirty-five minutes later, and he misses the view from the roof of St. Barts already. Above London, immersed in the smoke but thankfully remote from all the funny little people (and John), he'd been free, he'd been... cleansed. He could see _everything_ , up there, the way he can when he sleeps (if he sleeps) and all the puzzles are so clear, laid out for him like a London A-Z. Now he sees everything from infuriatingly close up, it is impossible to observe: useless to complete a jigsaw through a microscope.

Molly is looking at him across the morgue as if looking across space and time, and though her features are arranged to say 'concern' for once she isn't saying anything at all. Perhaps she is thinking better of this experiment, this mad rush to his aid: he knows why he asked her (because there was no-one else) but he still has no idea at all as to why she agreed. Bravado? Curiosity? Hero-worship? The pleasure of having the great Sherlock Holmes at her mercy? He can't tell. Humanity is the most bizarre and illogical of species: normally this knowledge merely leaves him feeling superior, but tonight it is as impossible to tolerate as a swarm of bees. It must be the shock of the fall: he needs time to recalibrate, to reach the clear heights he attained amongst the smog on the roof of St Barts.

(He can see John's face again, staring at him as he dropped. Why does it matter? Why does he allow himself to care?)

"I've been talking to your brother," Molly says, matter-of-fact: she is far more assured, less edgy around him now that he is officially dead. "We've got the autopsy sorted, but he says John had better not know anything or he'll be a target."

"Like you," he says, because the reference to his erstwhile flatmate stings absurdly, but she doesn't flinch.

"Yes," she agrees steadily, and puts away her stethoscope. "Like me."

He still can't understand why she is doing this, why she cares when she has to suspect that if their situations were reversed he would not do the same for her. ( _Would_ he? John would be far more certain of the answer than he is, he knows, but then John has always been far too sentimental.)

But he doesn't know. He doesn't _know_ ; he feels disorientated, dizzy as if still riding out the last aftershocks of a bad trip. There is no point in being a defective human being if he cannot compensate by being the perfect detective, and at present he is as far from being either as he has ever been.

"When's the funeral?" he asks, though he isn't sure why he wants to know. He can't imagine anyone being there, anyway.

"Friday," Molly tells him, and offers a lipstick-free little smile, fleeting and uncertain. "Which will be my birthday, actually."

"Oh. Happy birthday." He nearly tells her how futile it is, celebrating another year breathing in, breathing out, as if doing so for 365.25 days more is relevant to anything or anyone, and isn't really a cheap excuse to demand cheaper presents from those acquaintances who claim to care. But Molly is self-contained and serene, and right now she is the only woman in the world who knows that he is alive.

She is wheeling out another body now, the one which will play him at the inevitable inquest. It's quite a good likeness, actually; he is vaguely, grudgingly impressed. "I've been calling him JFK," she admits. "Do you think he's okay?"

There is a greetings card glittering pinkly on the corpse's chest; he ignores Molly's question to pluck the card open, catches the plane tickets before they can slip, reads _Your flight leaves Heathrow at 23:20. If you get caught, I'll kill you. L_ in Lestrade's characteristically comprehensive-educated scrawl. Is John, then, to be the only one of his... acquaintances... to truly think him dead? (Mrs Hudson he discounts: the woman has enough underworld connections that he has no doubt she will learn the truth of his fall soon enough.)

And still he wishes that he were back on the roof of St Barts, Moriarty's dead brown eyes fixed on his, where he could taste the acrid tang of diesel and blood in the air and could see everything; everything. There, where he could see the whole world turn, and the final solution was laid out for him like the Underground map, and he was triumphant and broken in the certainty of all that he had to do.

"You'd better go soon," Molly reminds him gently, though he knows and she knows that he has still failed to answer her last question. "You don't want to miss your flight."

"Yes," he agrees, and once she has finished tidying everything up he allows himself to be shown to the emergency exits even though he knows perfectly well where they are. He wonders if this is what it is like to be human: to allow oneself to disappear, and for the rest of the world to spin on on its axis, ignorant and unchanging and caring not at all. This is what he has always feared: that the world would be just the same without him, and that he would be just the same without the world. And John? What will he know? What will we care? What will he believe?

(Belief: an outmoded way of comprehending the world in the absence of proof.)

"Will you be okay?" Molly asks, soft and vexatiously concerned. "Where will you go?"

"Norway," he tells her, before he lets himself be lost again in the London smog, but in truth he has nothing, and no idea at all.


End file.
